The biggest obstacle to achieving 400kph at Bonneville in an F1 car is not in fact the surface or the high altitude of the salt flat but in fact the air. And so if the record breaker ever turned up to a grand prix Charlie Whiting would find that every dimension is legal, after all there is nothing in the rules that says you have to run a rear wing.” “Our first meeting became a bit of a brainstorming session, and we got carried away with supersonic this jet engine that” reveals Savage “But it was important for the car to retain its F1 feel as much as possible.
Currently Chuck Billington holds the record for a Class F Unblown Lakester at 229.969mph / 370.089kph.Īlthough the purpose built Lakesters are very different beasts to Grand Prix cars, with long chassis with closed cockpits and skinny tyres it was felt that the BAR should stay as close as possible to then current F1 regulations. In fact not had no Formula One car ever achieved speeds in excess of 400kph let alone on salt, no purpose built Bonneville Lakester in the same class as the BAR has done so either. “The ethos of the BAR Honda team is always one of challenge and that’s why we are doing this” explained BAR’s Gay Savage “the challenge that we have got is to make the car operate in an environment that it is not used to, to achieve a record by going to a speed that a car of our type has never gone to”. It was decided that the car would be modified. It became clear very quickly that a standard F1 car simply was not capable of running anywhere close to the 400kph target speed on the salt of Bonneville.
However BAR Honda did just that, and in the process their 067 Lakester became the fastest F1 car in history.īut its not just a simple case of taking last seasons test hack lopping off the wings and letting rip, to put a car that was designed, developed and built to run on the smooth surfaces of the mainly European circuits on the Formula One championship calendar. The rough salt is not the environment to run a Formula One car. Bonneville, the spiritual home of land speed records, 40,000 acres of flat salt used every year by teams in search of records.
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